The Company Man, is not who he expected, to say the least. His new accommodations are right in the center of Darklanding's misfits. He finds one native of Ungwilook willing to talk to him and tries to make him a deputy. But what really matters on Darklanding, are the mines.
Faced with a dangerous collapse that could kill hundreds of workers, he leaps into action and gets the story of Darklanding started. Fans of Firefly, Bonanza, and Tombstone will love this new series. Join us today and every 18 days, you’ll get a new episode of Darklanding.
Categories: Science Fiction > Space Adventure
Science Fiction > Dystopian
Keywords:
Space Western frontier colonization
Space Frontier Alien Contact
Space Opera SciFi evil company overlords
Science Fiction colonial adventure
Classic Western Sheriff saloon
Galactic Empire Colonization
Wild west episode serials
One liners ad copy:
A Space Sheriff, Aliens, and The Company – who’s the good guy?
The Sagittarian conglomerate made him the sheriff, and now he has to make it right.
When a war veteran becomes the sheriff on a backwater planet, justice is a one-man show.
Firefly meets Tombstone in this exciting new space opera serial.
A Space Sheriff, Aliens, The Company – and all the trouble one spaceport can’t handle.
When a war veteran becomes the sheriff on a backwater planet, justice is a one-man show. Firefly meets Tombstone in the first of this new 12-episode serial, a new episode published every 18 days.
A Space Sheriff, Aliens, The Company – and all the trouble one spaceport can’t handle.
Here is my publication checklist, for reference. Keep in mind that I am exclusive to Amazon. If you are wide, then this applies for your Amazon part and then going through D2D or a similar service will be helpful. If you upload direct to the major distributors (Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble), then you’ll need a separate checklist for each of those and that’s what makes D2D such an attractive option as each retailer has their own learning curve.
Publication Checklist
Action
Complete
Before Creating EBook Files
Complete MSS, including editing.
Acquire cover in highest res at 5:8 ratio, at least 1500x2400
Create Front Matter and Back Matter
Update ARC instruction document, if using one
Build SmartURL for ARC Distribution, if desired
Build SmartURL for Amazon purchase link
Build SmartURL for review link in eBook
Alert Social Media about upcoming book
Before creating KDP Draft Entry:
Down-sample the cover to 640 wide and 320 wide versions, for NLs
Solicit ARC readers, if desired
Research blurb
Research categories (total of ten)
Research keywords
Build book file using your favorite program (Word, Adobe, Scrivener, Jutoh)
Build BookFunnel entry for ARC, load book file into BookFunnel
Send out NL about upcoming book
Send out ARC emails, if desired
Update blog/website with news
Back up ALL Files, preferably on permanent media like CD/DVD
Create KDP Draft Entry
Complete all fields in KDP entry
Load Blurb
Select two 'best fit' categories
Load Keywords
Load Bookfile
Load Cover
Have price ready (all countries)
Hit Publish
After hitting publish:
Wait for ASIN to post on Amazon
Update spreadsheet & data collection tools (add ASIN & book in series)
Update all SmartURL links (purchase and review links)
Get FB posts ready (with link preloaded)
Update affiliate links for website (Amazon’s Affiliate Program)
When Amazon shows book live:
Launch FB posts
Add to Author Central page
Send email to Amazon to add other eight categories
Get Affiliate link
Update webpage
Update SmartURL with links to book for major markets
Update Blog
Send Newsletter
Update others for Author NL Swaps, including full and low res images
Check in on Goodreads to see if the new book posted
Update the eBook file with a link to do a Review right after "The End"
Once the book file can be updated - reupload with review link
GET BACK TO WRITING THE NEXT BOOK
You’ll notice that I don’t have “Check book ranking and also-boughts by compulsively clicking refresh” or any of the other ego boosters. Understand, I do it, too, but a lot less than I used to.
I do a lot of online promotion on launch day, responding to fan comments about the launch and especially praising those who are first to review or even just the first to read the book and leave a comment on Facebook.
I know many authors don’t follow Goodreads, but Amazon bought Goodreads because that’s where the readers hang out. You might see something interesting. That’s why I check. It’s also nice to see the number of readers who have the book in their TBR (to be read) pile or listed it as currently reading.
Booklaunch.com has a great checklist that is worth checking out to give you a different and more extensive view of tracking what you need to do and when you need to do it.
Cover Art
I will always recommend getting the best cover you can for your book. That doesn’t mean getting the most expensive one. Some of my less expensive covers are great. What makes a great cover?
Needs to speak to the genre (you do this by looking at the top 100 covers for that genre – what stands out consistently?)
Needs to be visible and understandable at thumbnail size (many readers will buy directly from their phones – make sure they can see your main cover details at the smallest resolution)
Brand consistency – set your brand to make sure that readers can subconsciously link your books
Coloring is important but contrast will give you the low-res legibility you need
I am not a visual arts kind of person, but I know a lot of people who are. I hire graphic designers to do covers, because the best artwork does not necessarily make for the best cover. You have to have great art and a great cover. Artists don’t necessarily make for the best typographers. I’ve had three people work on my covers, a photographer/photoshop expert, a graphic designer/illustrator, and a typographer. Here’s the end result. I shrank it down so you can see how it works, and on the next page, you’ll see the full size version.
In the next example below, here is an expensive cover that is great artwork, but had to be lightened for the final presentation. If you step back, you’ll see that the image fades away.
So we went with some different typography, a little lightening, and came up with the following.
There are no hard and fast rules with covers, so all anyone can ever give you is an opinion and the opinions that matter most are the readers of your genre. If you check online, you’ll find that most of the covers that get awards are literary fiction in style, which should tell you that those awards are like a self-licking ice cream cone. What’s the purpose?
To sell more books! That’s always the purpose. So use the cover that will sell more books, and that means listening to the readers. After you’ve put out a book or two, canvass your readers. Send out a poll in your newsletter asking basic questions: how did you find my books; what did you like about them; does this cover grab you, etc. You’ll also find your superfans that way. Send one or two respondents to your poll a signed paperback or something personal.
At Christmas, one-year Kindle Unlimited subscriptions were discounted to $80. I gave a bunch of those away to my fans
through various contests, plus I gave all my beta readers a subscription. (Even though they had KU already, it extended their renewal date by a year.)
Title
It is important to get your title right. When you come up with something, ask people what they think the book will be about. My Free Trader series is going to get re-titled at some point. Free Trader of Warren Deep. Seriously?
Yes, that’s my title for a space adventure. But trade is key! I argue. That’s fine, but don’t put it into the title! I have six books, soon to be nine books, strapped to this name. I have to work extra hard to get people to look beyond the title to see the space adventure within. A better title would have been “A Young Man and his Mindlinked Cat” or even “A New World Among the Stars.”
Live and learn, but nothing is a show-stopper. It was just harder. Work smarter, not harder like I did.
For titles, shorter is better. Action or suspense is good. I love Jennifer Foehner-Wells’s title, Fluency, with the spaceship on the cover. Well done! It makes you think about how would we converse with aliens, which is exactly what the book is about.
Or Richard Fox’s Iron Dragoons with a cover showing the head of a mechanized soldier. That book won the Dragon Award, because people could get into it, from cover to blurb to story. It all worked perfectly.
Keywords
These keywords are different from AMS keywords (far different). You do not get to put other author names in here. You get up to fifty characters and can put phrases or a bunch of keywords.
I’ve done both the stacking and individual words. By stacking, I put a number of keywords together and that gets me into the categories I want without having to email Amazon. (More on that below.) In my example above for Darklanding, I used these keywords.
Keywords:
Space Western frontier colonization
Space Frontier Alien Contact
Space Opera SciFi evil company overlords
Science Fiction colonial adventure
Classic Western Sheriff saloon
Galactic Empire Colonization
Wild west episode serials
I dutifully checked them using KDP Rocket and found that most did not have a high impact. Western by itself was good. Galactic Empire was good, as was Colonization. The jury was out about evil company overlords, but I had to leave that in for my own edification, and so on. You want keywords here that someone perusing Amazon might use so that your book shows up in their search results.
Which is the same thing you are doing with the keywords in your ads, but you can have a thousand of those. You want your books to show up to those searching and to those browsing particular categories. Keep that in mind as you select your keywords. If anyone searches Amazon for Western sheriff saloon, Darklanding will show up first.
Blurb
The blurb is an ad for your book, not a synopsis. Keep that in mind from the outset. Blurbs are considered copywriting. Look at it from the outside. What entices you as a reader when you see a blurb? A laundry list of back story? A bunch of character and place names?
How about a dilemma? I love Richard Fox’s tagline for his Ember War series. “The Earth is doomed. Humanity has a chance.”
One of the best in the business is Bryan Cohen, whose book How to Write a Sizzling Synopsis gives numerous examples to help you understand and guide you through the process. Bryan offers the following three questions:
1. What problem are you solving?
2. How is your book the solution? Or at the least, what are people getting out of your book?
3. How will this entertain or change them?
The simplest things aren’t simple at all. The best blurbs are short and high-impact. They get into your head like a clever jingle and won’t let go. YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK! You have to read it because the dilemma speaks to you. You have to know what happens next. You’ve embraced the character and their challenges and want to share their lives.
Brian Meeks suggests using engaging words. (You’ll find them in his book on Mastering Amazon Ads.) Combine them into a call to action like, “What would you do?” This is powerful phraseology because it doesn’t presume success. “Will Anita save the day?” Of course she will, unless it’s a dark horror book, and then her efforts at hiding in the basement among the creepy taxidermist’s knife set probably won’t end well. A question to make the reader think.
Here is my best converting blurb. It converts at anywhere from 1 to 4 to 1 to 8, and yes, I violate the ‘can he save the world?’ question that I just told you to avoid.
A Cat and his human minions fight to bring peace to humanity.
"Craig Martelle is a masterful writer with a grand imagination."
"Reminiscent of science fiction of the 60s. Sort of a cross between Star Man's Son 2250AD by Andre Norton and Robert Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky."
"You clearly are, like the great Asimov, a master of Science Fiction."
The Free Trader takes you to a world across the galaxy, where humans are not the only sentient species. After a devastating war, humanity and its creations rise again. The Free Trader finds himself at a crossroads - can he and his Cat prevent a repeat of past mistakes?
And the follow-on series...
Cygnus Space Opera (set in the Free Trader Universe)
Book 1 - Cygnus Rising
Book 2 - Cygnus Expanding
Book 3 - Cygnus Arrives
I included the follow-on books because those don’t show up on the series page, so I keep the readers informed that not only is there soon to be nine books in the series, there’s a follow-on series, too. The readership that I’ve developed read a great number of books, so telling them there are twelve books in the series is beneficial.
On a side note, there is some question about using quotes within the book description. It seems like it may be a violation of Amazon’s TOS, but I’ve never heard of anyone getting their book taken down for using them. I no longer put quotes in mine, but I do have some older blurbs that I’m leaving alone and hoping that Amazon grandfathers them in under any new interpretation.
Categories
How do you know which category is best for your book? That is both an ego and a business question. Getting a bestseller tag in a lesser known category looks good and helps in visibility, I believe, but the only thing that really matters is the bottom line—the gross number of sales. (Rank is made up of sales and borrows if you are exclusive to Amazon in KDP Select.)
Visibility helps with sales. Reviews help with sales. Getting Amazon to push your book helps with sales, and there are a lot of guesstimates on how you get Amazon to do that. I haven’t seen any that are definitive beyond selling more books.
Books that sell well seem to continue to sell well. Some of that could be through word of mouth or exposure in the also-boughts, which is free promotion above the sponsored ads listing. Recently, we’ve seen that some titles don’t get the also-bought line populated. That is worrisome as the only way to show people your book on similar books is by paying for ads.
And that goes back to making sure you are in the right category for your book. KDP Rocket (a Kindlepreneur product from Dave Chesson) has a new feature called Category Hunter. This is an exceptional addition to help you research where you will find the most traction for like books. You want to get on their also-boughts so people looking for that type of book see yours—with your engaging cover that makes them click and ‘read more.’
Find a combination of categories that will give you visibility in the category with the most books where you still could see a top twenty ranking. For example, I compete in the space opera category of science fiction. Today (March 14th, 2018), the book sitting at number one is selling 629 copies with an overall Amazon book rank of 174 while the 20th book in the category is selling 105 copies and has an overall Amazon book rank of 1321. That is a pretty robust category with a lot of competition. But then I can put my book into Alien Invasion as a secondary category, where the category’s bestseller has an over
all Amazon rank of 455 and the number 20 book in the category has an overall rank of 1438.
I know that my books will tickle the top 200, so these two categories work for me. But I could also go after the Teen & Young Adult Aliens category, which requires the books to be put in the 13 to 18+ category when uploaded. First book there is 788 overall and the 20th book is 11022. It doesn’t hurt to have a bestseller tag while also being seen in popular categories with lots of visitors. A rising tide floats all boats, doesn’t it?
I can’t recommend KDP Rocket highly enough. If you want to make data-driven business decisions, then get the right data.
Become a Successful Indie Author Page 7
